1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a behavior prediction apparatus in consideration of a social value and a method for the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, global environment problems attract attention. In such circumstances, each company is expected to develop and provide products and services having lower environmental loads and higher social values.
When the people purchase and use the effective product and service that these companies provide, they may have spare times. If the people do a new behavior in the spare time, the unexpected environmental load that seems to exceed the environmental load reduced by the new product and service may occur. Such a situation is referred to as a rebound effect.
Accordingly, it is important to reduce not only the direct environmental load of the product and service, but also the environmental load including a behavior occurred newly or not to increase them in order to reduce the environmental load and enhance the social value throughout the entire society.
In addition, in order for various measures for reducing such an environmental load to be considered, it is necessary to predict beforehand what behavior is done in an unscheduled spare time. In this behavior prediction, since there is a difference in a sequence of behaviors occurring due to circumstances that the spare time occurs, personal preference or habit, such a factor must be considered.
A life cycle assessment (LCA) prescribed in ISO 14040 is known as a method of evaluating the whole product life cycle from a step of mining for the materials necessary for manufacturing products to a step of disposing used products in a viewpoint of the environmental load. In this LCA, the product life cycle is expressed as an evaluation scenario and evaluated. This evaluation scenario includes user information such as frequency in use as well as maker information such as material composition of a product.
However, LCA cannot evaluate the product life cycle without the scenario. Further, it has no method for creating a scenario concerning a rebound effect.
On the other hand, JP-A 2005-327134 (KOKAI) discloses an apparatus for detecting an abnormal situation of a human in a house. This apparatus accumulates behavior patterns of a senior as transition probability to detect behavior abnormality of the senior at home, for example. The apparatus comprises a region sensor to sense a human existing region, a behavior sensor to label the behavior of a human automatically using movement of a human body and a duration thereof, a calculator to calculate transition between regions and behavior transition in the regions, a data storage, and an abnormal determination unit. The abnormal determination unit compares each of a behavior transition in a region in every time zone, a transition between regions every time zone and a staying time in the region with each of normal ones to determine an abnormality from the result of comparison.
JP-A 2002-352352 (KOKAI) discloses an apparatus of detecting abnormality of a human living behavior pattern, comprising an existence detection unit, an behavior detection unit and a behavior estimation unit, wherein an operation sensing signal can be used as an ON/OFF signal of home electric appliances. The abnormal determination unit comprises an existence detection unit, an operation detection unit and a behavior estimation unit, and determines abnormality by obtaining deviance between the output produced from each unit by ON/OFF of the home electric appliance and statistical data and goodness-of-fit therebetween.
The IEEJ Trans. E, Vol. 125, No. 6, 2005, pp. 256-264 discloses an apparatus of detecting abnormal situation of a senior at home, comprising a behavior sensor, a region sensor, a behavior pattern calculator, a data storage and an abnormality determination unit. The behavior pattern of the senior is learned from hidden Markov model based on information provided from the behavior sensor and the region sensor. The abnormal determination unit determines whether or not the behavior of the senior is daily by calculating similarity between a behavior pattern and a predictive pattern.
The above related arts relate to a technique for determining whether or not the current behavior of a human is an abnormality behavior, and do not consider at all to predict a behavior considering a future social worth under a certain circumstance, or to recommend and guide a behavior.